In the first seed of the iOS 16 developer beta, the Shortcuts app has received 51 new actions that support interacting with Apple’s first-party apps and help take advantage of system features. The actions provided work with Notes, Voice Memos, Mail, Safari, Shortcuts, Clock, Parked Cars, Image Backgrounds, Personal Hotspot, Files, PDFs, and Reminders, plus there’s an initial batch of bug fixes for actions and new Mac support for Safari Reader and Evernote actions.
This guide was compiled using a list provided by the Shortcuts team during Q&A sessions at WWDC, plus another post on Reddit and one of its comments, plus some of my own research using the developer betas.
I’ve sorted larger groups into sections, plus marked any actions with - do not currently work in the first developer beta.
This initial set of actions from iOS 16 is very welcome — Apple’s added a lot more native support for their own apps, an encouraging sign that they’ll continue to do so with their remaining apps that do not yet have Shortcuts support. I’d love to see some of these apps go even further in their Shortcuts support. Apps like Mail could further in letting us retrieve mail to work with, Safari’s tab groups can be created but we cannot pull the tabs out into our shortcuts, and Shortcuts should be able to create Folders now that we can open them — I hope Apple adds these as actions for the iOS 16 release and doesn’t wait until a point release or next year to round out these apps’ Shortcuts adoption.
I’ll be updating this post with new actions added in later betas, along with additional posts explaining what’s new and links back here. Once the public betas are released, these will all be documented in full as part of my Action Directory. Plus, I’ve already created a ton of shortcuts using these actions (I really love Open Folder): Once the public betas are released, these new shortcuts will be available exclusively for my membership during the beta season, so be sure to sign up to get access before the iOS 16 release in the fall.